Lisa Drummond

Lisa Drummond is a theoretical astrophysicist interested in some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe, including neutron stars, black holes, the environments they inhabit, and the gravitational waves they emit. Her work focuses on compact-object binaries as precision, multi-messenger probes of strong gravity. 

She is particularly interested in extreme mass-ratio systems and neutron-star interiors as laboratories for testing general relativity and constraining the fundamental physics of compact objects. She is currently a Burke Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (TAPIR), where she works on a range of problems in gravitational and high-energy astrophysics. Her research includes modelling gravitational-wave signals from extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs), constraining black hole properties using X-ray observations of quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs) and probing neutron-star physics with radio pulsar data. 

Lisa completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2024. Her doctoral work used black hole perturbation theory to study extreme mass-ratio binaries and the gravitational waves they produce, with particular emphasis on modelling the impact of the secondary’s spin on the waveform. She previously earned her Master of Science at the University of Melbourne, where she studied the interaction of topological defects (neutron vortices and proton flux tubes) within the quantum fluids of neutron star interiors.